Dealerships don't want to spend more on tools needed to service the Volts since sales for most are down

Select Chevrolet dealerships around the U.S. are ditching the Volt after General Motors (GM) hiked up the price of tools to service the vehicle.

Last year, dealerships spent $1,800 to $2,800 on tools that are required to service each Volt plug-in hybrid. However, GM has raised the price of these tools to $5,100. The reason? A battery-repowering tool that removes and ships sections of the Volt's huge 435-pound battery for repair instead of shipping the whole thing costs dealerships about $4,735. This makes up the bulk of the tool costs while a few others are needed as well.

Due to this price hike, some dealerships have decided to stop selling the Volt altogether. Some say their overall Volt sales just don't justify the additional cost.

Allyn Barnard, owner of Jim Barnard Chevrolet in Churchville, New York, is among those who feel that way. He has only sold five Volts since the vehicle's launch in late 2010/early 2011, and doesn't see the point in paying over $5,000 for the tools needed to service them.

"Going forward, the profitability would be really hard for us to justify the expense of the repair tools," said Barnard.

The Volt may have had a bumpy start with a few production shutdowns and issues with lithium ion battery fires during National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) testing, but sales of the Volt have been very impressive over the last year. During the first seven months of 2012, GM sold 10,666 Volt extended range electric vehicles for an increase of 270% compared to the first seven months of 2011.

However, Chevrolet then had a low November sales month due to low inventory. Chevrolet sold 1,519 Volts in November 2012, which represented a 33 percent increase over November 2011. But the number of cars sold in November was roughly half the number sold in October and September when the company sold 2,961 and 2,851 Volts respectively.

As of December 2012, General Motors had sold 20,828 Volts for the year.

Despite these excellent numbers (Nissan was hoping to sell 20,000 Leafs in 2012, but fell way short), about 70 percent of Volt sales are generated by the 300 top-selling dealerships. There are about 2,614 dealerships certified to sell the Volt.

First off, try adding some paragraphs next time. There's nothing appealing about a wall of text.

Second, it sounds like your buddy did not do his homework before purchasing a Volt. The car is not designed to be a mass-produced and consumed vehicle. Instead, it was engineered to be driven by those who live in cities or drive less than 50 miles a day. The problems he is having do not sound consistent with my experience, not even remotely. The car is a pleasure to drive, has incredible pick-up, and has many conveniences not seen in similarly equipped vehicles. As said before I've driven over 4,000 miles and I still have the same tank of Gas.

Another thing, I don't understand why any rational person would only charge his car 3 times. A standard 120V outlet works perfectly fine, and by the time I wake up in the morning, my vehicle is completely charged, ready to go for up to 45 miles. On top of that the car battery has an 8 year, 100,00 mile warranty, not to mention the highest owner satisfaction of any car on the road. In all honesty, I think you simply made up everything you said.

I made up everything I said? lol yeah you're right I sat here and made up my friend and his whole Volt experience I'm being paid to make up stories lolllll. Sounds like you are making up your own experience with the Volt trying to convince yourself you didn't make the extremely bad purchase that you did. Should be continue to falsely accuse each other? Or face the facts that though you may love the vehicle there are many others out there who do not including people who own it. In a few months if you can get a hold of the number of volts Lemoned in California I promise one of those would have been my friends :)

First off I will type out a post any way I feel like it this is a sub-par forum based news site not somewhere to type out a book report and hope it gets published. You don't want to read 1 single paragraph, don't read.

I dispute that fact. Just because the volt best serves people driving less than 40 miles a day does NOT mean that was its sole intended purpose otherwise there wouldn't be a gasoline engine in it as well. Even if you drove <40m a day you don't honk you would ever need to go further? Emergencies? Vacations? And a million other reasons? The volt is designed to save gas for those who drive <40m a day but by no mana is it only intended for that sort of use. If you drive 80miles like my friend it would still be cutting your gas consumption by half every day and that's what he first found appealing.We live in Los Angeles so his car is used for city driving. Being young he also doesn't go straight home after work which is 1 reason why he drives 80~m a day.The volt is an expensive golf cart and definitely not worth the money. It doesn't save you enough gas to justify the price ESPECIALLY if you are driving less than 40miles a day! How much money in gas could it possibly be saving you?! $6-7 a day in gas in you drive only 40 miles, then subtract how much it costs to charge the car and your savings probably dip to about $4 a day. At that rate it would take years just to break even and as soon as you start saving some money (very very little a day) 2-3 years into that any money you "saved" will be used to replace your battery pack unless you were smart enough to just lease a volt.

He definitely should not have gotten a Volt and definitely would be better served with a Fusion or any hybrid really but I can argue that that's true for any Volt buyer. Sad thing is he has enough money to never worry about spending any of it on gas lol.

No my friend did not do the proper research he bought into the hype like many volt purchasers did. So the car is ONLY made to be driven less than forty miles a day? That's news to me I wonder why they even bothered to add a gasoline engine. As for conveniences not present in other similarly equips vehicles, like that? The battery and electric motor and? what does it have that other vehicles in the same price range don't have? His car doesn't have anything my cheaper Ford Edge with Sync doesn't have or any other similarly priced vehicle.

Lets see. The car has four camera, two on each side, one in the front and back, that allows for collision detection and lane departure assistance. I can start my car from my cellphone, On-Star can beam directions directly to my nav system, not to mention about 100 other things that I will list later on. Time for dinner = )

"hundreds of other things" lol so your car has HUNDREDS of features that cars in its same price range don't have? Wow I didn't know Chevy was so futuristic! Power seats? I've never heard I that before! Floormats sheesh I wish my car came with those. Open your trunk keyless I wish I had that... Oh wait I do. You can't go calling standard features on a forty-k car as anything but what they are, standard.

Lets see here--I think I will buy an electric car but don't give any thought to having a outlet to plug it in. Maybe he thought the electricity would just come out of the air. I have a Volt with about 11,000 miles and 10,000 of them are battery miles and 1,000 from the gas generator. On gas the Volt gets about 40 mpg. I always plug in to 110v and it will charge during the night. About 78% of the people drive 40 miles per day or less so for a lot of us it works well and if your not one then buy something else. Great car that handles nice as the batttery is low and it has good torque (273ft lbs.) at 0 rpm. It has a gas engine so you can use it as a first car and drive across the country or 40 miles a day as I do.I agree that GM somestimes pulls dumb moves but this is not one of them.

"If you look at the last five years, if you look at what major innovations have occurred in computing technology, every single one of them came from AMD. Not a single innovation came from Intel." -- AMD CEO Hector Ruiz in 2007